Clothing and Fabric production
Throughout Europe, the dress of the time was little different from place to place. Trousers and a knee-length tunic were worn by men, while women wore a full-length dress, with either a more expensive over-dress or an apron. Sleeves were full-length on both tunics and dresses.
Shoes have been found on several sites, made from leather. Some are known as "turn shoes", because they were constructed inside-out and then turned, leaving the stitching on the inside, while some others were stitched with a ridge up the front. In a few cases, the upper is stitched to the sole on the outside, in a similar way to modern shoes, so that the stitching is visible on the upper, and is pulled into a cut slot on the bottom of the sole to protect the thread.
Although some trading was carried on between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, almost everything had to be made locally. Every family made their own clothes, mainly from wool. This was taken from the sheep by pulling it from their fleeces (it fell out naturally anyway), and then had to be "carded" to untangle it. The next stage was to spin the wool into a coarse yarn using a drop spindle, which is a thin piece of wood with a weight at the bottom. The weight keeps the fibres straight and helps to draw them from the bundle of wool in the hand. The spindle is spun by hand, twisting the woollen strands together as they are fed through the fingers. The yarn is then collected on the spindle.
Once the wool has been spun, it is woven into cloth on a warp-weighted loom , which is a large rectangular frame, on which the warp (vertical threads) are hung from a cross-pole, and weighted at the bottom using stone or clay weights which are usually ring-shaped. The weft (horizontal threads) are then inserted using a hand-held shuttle and beaten down by hand or with a wooden tool. A separate wooden frame is used to keep the warp threads separated into two, allowing them to be brought forward or pushed back to form the cloth.
After the cloth had been woven, it was cut to length and sewn into clothes. The few examples of cloth which have survived show that the stitching was of a very high standard, with very small stitches in a regular size and frequency, almost comparable with modern machine stitching. Clothes took a large amount of effort to make, and so were made to last. They would have been patched if they were damaged, and would be looked after by their owners.
For richer families, imported linen or even silk were used for some clothes, but it would still have been common for them to wear wool. Wealth was shown not only in the quality of the cloth, but in the number and quality of colours worn, as some dyes were very expensive. Natural dyes tend to produce muted colours in browns, greens and dull reds, and so the wealthy Viking or Saxon would probably wear the brightest colours he/she could afford, making them look garish to our modern eyes.
To finish the clothes, it was common for the bottom hems, collars and sleeves of tunics, aprons, and sometimes dresses to be descorated with either embroidery (late Anglo-Saxon), or a woven braid known as "tablet weaving". This was constructed using square pieces of wood with a hole drilled in each corner (tablets), which were threaded with wool of different colours. Multiple tablets are used to give multiple strands of wool along the length of the braid. When the weft thread is passed from one side of the braid to the other, a different colour can be brought to the top by rotating one or more tablets. By experimenting with which tablets to turn, how far, and in which direction, complex patterns can be created in several colours.